TOGO TO THE RESCUE

A celebration of the iconic sled dog who led a medical rescue mission to Nome, Alaska, in 1925.

Balto the sled dog still gets the press, but Togo did more of the work—leading a team that carried diphtheria serum through storm and over ice on one long, dangerous leg of a 674-mile relay mission. But the entire team’s intrepid spirit and strength of doggy character—which Robert J. Blake portrayed so compellingly in his 2002 Togo—is at best only fitfully present here. The golden, stubby-legged pooch in the painted illustrations doesn’t look anything like the noble figure in the closing photos, and, when they’re not lounging at ease in the Alaska wilderness, dining on fish elegantly served on dinner plates, the team’s dogs are depicted merrily mushing along beneath clear, high skies over a neatly plowed path or even somehow upright on a vertical cliff, harking perhaps back to a previous reference to “curvy landscapes.” And though the afterword has details about sled dogs in general and Togo’s later life in particular, the author admits that one incident she’s depicted to demonstrate his intelligence actually occurred on an earlier, unrelated journey. Togo’s owner was white, but there is some racial variation in scenes depicting the crowds that flocked to see him on a subsequent tour of the U.S.

Takes too many liberties with the facts, for all that the tribute is well deserved.